Page 118 - Successful Onboarding

Teaching Culture So That Our New Hires “Get It” • 107

Truth in Advertising: Apple

The carefully designed welcome box Apple gives to all new hires before their
start dates contains a short, clear, and inspirational statement of what the
firm values and doesn’t value in the performance of new hires. It is so effec-
tive that we’ll let it speak for itself:
“There’s work and there’s your life’s work. The kind of work that has your
fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That
you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t
come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end. They want
their work to add up to something. Something Big. Something that couldn’t
happen anywhere else.”
This statement is a very big motivator. Does it excite the workforce and
affect the Onboarding Margin? You bet it does!
To provide further evidence of this point, our capture of this story was not
from Apple. Rather it was from a new hire who proudly posted photographs
and verbatims of his welcome kit on his personal blog. He was so moved by
this message that he wanted to share with his community. His blog received
great comments of endorsement from friends and admirers. His new
employer had already begun (even before Day One) to move this new hire
up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid (see Chapter 1).

The key, ultimately, is to take new hires beyond the veneer of established
and unspoken norms in a way that does not dumb down the organizational
culture or evade its full complexity. We cannot just say that our company
is forgiving or unforgiving. Organizations are uneven, so of course they
will be forgiving in some ways and unforgiving in others. For instance, our
firm might want to convey that the accounts payable is unforgiving in its
rules for out-of-pocket expense reimbursements, but that if a manager took
on a risky initiative and it didn’t work out, we’d be very forgiving. By using
simple language, going out of their way to identify areas of distinction, and
citing specific examples, as the Netflix presentation does, well-designed
onboarding programs can give new hires a deeper experience of this com-
plexity without eliciting confusion. As for the third principle, new hires